Real time 30fps - free engine.
I appreciate that vray can do better - but this is ‘good enough’. And at 30fps just murders pre rendered for most uses.
Try to produce a work like this yourself with Unreal compared to V-Ray and the answer to your question will be obvious.
Best regards,
Vlado
Damn that’s a bit cheeky on the part of the OP! It is very interesting but I don’t think you have too much to worry about Vlado.
Sure the quality of those realtime videos are impressive but the amount of effort you have to do to even make it work is pretty intense compared to what you have to do in vray.
And OP your tone is way out of line.
Actually, I think it’s a valid question. I’m not reading any “tone” in the question.
Yes some people are aware of the tons and tons of work that go into producing realtime stuff, and some people are not.
The same can be said about what we do with Max and VRay. How many times did the client (or your boss) say to you, why is it taking so long, don’t you just click render?
Just because somebody is not informed or not familiar with a process, doesn’t make them rude or an idiot, even though we would sometime like to think of them as that.
There´s still no raytracing, so no real glossy reflections. Those faked refractions for example look pretty dull compared to a real renderer.
No dynamic GI, for the moment. The displacement quality is far worse.
While the static GI quality is pretty good and they seem to use irradiance cache for static GI, there are many many things that can not be done.
Also the scene setup requires much more work. You can´t just throw in some models and render a nice looking scene.
For realtime stuff it´s absolutely awesome. But if you look into the details it´s still far away from a non realtime renderer.
I did not intend to be rude, and sorry if it came out like this. I really do think it is best to try these things out and compare the workflow differences. I’m sure that more and more people will find the game engine workflow for walkthroughs more than adequate.
Best regards,
Vlado
I think it’s probably also worth noting that using UE4 doesn’t necessarily mean your work is going to look as spectacular as the demo videos we’ve seen floating around. I wonder how many people have seen those videos, jumped in head-first only to come up with something less than spectacular and get disheartened by it. Probably many more than the few that are actually doing nice work I would hazzard a guess…
Without a doubt the bar is raising for RT, mainly with advanced GPUs and hardware advances across the board, but equally the bar for pre-rendered work has gone up… It’s now totally achievable to render huge data sets at massive resolution with advanced effects on a fairly standard workstation . All the advances that are making RT possible are also changing for the better the way I work in high res rendering.
If you do arch-viz in production and are reasonably familiar with the game asset pipeline, it’s obvious why offline rendering still wins, and it’s mostly to do with limitations (texture sizes including lightmaps, the need to unwrap everything for both texturing AND lightmapping, etc etc etc). One of the bigger ones is vegetations - games are nowhere near geometry leaves. In short, there is significantly more work to do to get something in game and looking good than the benefit you get from the resulting realtime render.
In a similar vein, I just took a trip to Octane land.
Let me tell you that what looks gee-wiz wonderful will soon thereafter result in a bloody forehead from repeatedly banging it against a brick wall. Nothing compares to the quality I get from VRay.
If chaosgroup can make the type of visual effects that unreal can, I think vray wouldn’t have to worry for another 10 years.
But the atmosphere effects, bloom, DOF and lens flares in UE4 give your work an amazing look, extremely quickly.
In my opinion, this is what’s so appealing to everyone; not the real time part.
They are all post-effects. If they work for you, this is great, but I’m not really interested in going there. The goal of V-Ray is to simulate DOF and atmospheric effects accurately, even if this is (much) slower. Bloom you can already do in the VFB, but there are no plans for lens flares.
Best regards,
Vlado
oh go on, everyone loves lens flare.
Hehe, possibly, but if things get to a point where the future of V-Ray depends on whether it has lens flares or not, I think will be doomed anyways…
Best regards,
Vlado
Vlado lets assume there are people waiting to buy vray the moment it has some build in lensflares. How many new adopters would you need in order to make developing such a feature worth it? 
I would tell them to simply get photoshop or something. I really don’t want to spend time on that - regardless of how many people are waiting for it.
Best regards,
Vlado
i was being sarcastic by the way.. i dont want lensflares in vray. however, if we could get it to play a selection of your favourite music while it renders…
I’m interested in this topic. Although I don’t see UE4 replacing Vray, there is definitely going to be a merging of pre-rendered vs real-time 3d. I’m hoping more for Vray integration within UE4 or Unity 
Either as a baking solution or somehow optimizing Vray RT to work in a game engine. I just want to use Vray for VR!
well assuming a very approximate rendertime of 1 hr a frame on a modern gpu for a noise free image, we just need to wait for gpus to be 3600 times faster and we can have RT at 60fps.
or of course buy 3600 gpus…